


Of Bravery

by novelized



Category: My Heartbeat - Garret Freymann-Weyr
Genre: Family Dynamics, Gen, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 13:25:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2734220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novelized/pseuds/novelized
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has been over two months since Ellen has seen her brother. He leaves for Europe tomorrow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Bravery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [implicated2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/implicated2/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, [implicated2](http://archiveofourown.org/users/implicated2)! I'm so glad someone loves this little book as much as I do. I hope you enjoy xx

Ellen changes her outfit three times that night. It was easier, she concedes to herself, when her mother forced her into dresses that made her seem five years younger than she actually was, because now it takes time and money and thought. Even when she’s just having dinner with her brother. She thinks about what she’ll look like when she steps out of the taxi, if the breeze will catch her hair just right, or if she’ll be picking at windblown tangles all throughout dessert. If a boy standing on the corner, maybe waving down a taxi of his own, will catch her eye and think she’s interesting, or pretty. Things that didn’t used to matter before. When her world had been constructed for her, when she’d been inducted into a group without fanfare, without initiation or judgment. 

One semester in and she already knows that college is all about initiation and judgment. 

In the back seat of the cab, Ellen fishes a granola bar out of her purse and breaks it into small pieces. She stares out the window and chews slowly, methodically. They’re going to a restaurant that Ellen loves, but Link will foot the bill, and she feels guilty ordering too much food. She does this every time they meet for dinner. Link pretends he doesn’t know. 

Outside, people are scurrying from one building to another, taking quick but pointed steps, clutching fur coats around their shoulders, scarves wound up to their noses. Ellen hadn’t made the decision to stay in New York until early spring, but even though she’s close to home she might as well have moved three thousand miles away. Her parents are surprisingly good at giving her space, at asking for the requisite weekly phone call home (which she makes on Sundays, when everyone else in her dorm is at dinner) and letting that be enough. They ask about her classes, her grades, her roommate, but they don’t ever ask about her love life. If she’s dating anyone. She wonders if Link gets the same amount of selective privacy and decides he probably gets even more.

The driver lets her out at curbside, where Link is already waiting, jacket pulled up to his neck against the cold. She pays the fare and steps out, and the wind isn’t blowing, and she decides she doesn’t look interesting _or_ pretty, but anyway, there’s no one around to really look.

Link pulls her in for a hug. They didn’t used to do this, because while they weren’t strangers to overlapped legs on the couch during movie nights, or shoulder bumps at fancy restaurants with too-small tables, they didn’t often show affection in such loud ways. College, or distance, or simply growing up; one of those has changed Link, and Ellen thinks it’s for the better.

She doesn’t squeeze him tight, even though she has the impulse, because she doesn’t want him to change his mind and let go. But she does speak first.

“You could have gone in, Link,” she says, which is what she says every time. In the beginning, their dinner dates were frequent—long weekends or breaks, a Saturday afternoon to spare, where they’d find somewhere new to eat, hole-in-the-wall diners or mom-and-pop sandwich shops, each traveling just under an hour to meet in the middle—but then they’d dwindled, making rainchecks that were rainchecked, empty promises that next time, next time it’d work out.

It has been over two months since Ellen has seen her brother. He leaves for Europe tomorrow. 

“I didn’t mind waiting,” Link says, and escorts her in.

They have reservations here. Ellen doesn’t ask why he didn’t invite their parents along, even though it’s in the city and they would have been thrilled, but they’re ushered to their seats, and Link orders wine for them both. This isn’t the sort of restaurant where they’re asked for their IDs. This isn’t the sort of restaurant where Ellen admits that she’s never actually learned to like wine, despite an entire semester’s worth of trying.

“How’s your art?” Link asks, first thing, and Ellen loves him for it. She waits days and weeks for this question, for it to be asked meaningfully, for someone to ask and actually want to know. He claims he doesn’t always get art, doesn’t appreciate it the way Ellen does, but he makes an effort, and that’s enough. That’s more than enough. 

“Improving,” Ellen answers honestly, which is what her professor had told her. “I’m trying to learn how to view life’s microscopic moments in extravagant ways. Purposely making molehills into mountains.” There’s a plate of freshly-baked bread on their table, but she notices no one else in the restaurant is touching theirs. Like it’s room decor. Or potpourri. 

Link sees her looking and picks up the knife. “Interesting,” he says, cuts them each a slice.“How do you do that?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.” She accepts the plate gratefully and thinks about how a classmate in Psych 101 had mentioned that it sometimes seemed like siblings could speak their own private languages, and how, up until now, she wasn’t sure if that was true. But Link always knew when she needed to sleep in his bedroom. She could always tell when he wasn’t saying what he really meant. And Link knows when she wants bread. “But,” she adds, “I think it’d work for you too.”

“Oh?”

“In Europe. Looking for the small things. When everyone else is staring at the Eiffel Tower, you should look for a couple celebrating their fiftieth anniversary, still wildly in love. Or instead of taking a picture of Big Ben, talk to a stranger. Ask for his story. Everyone has one.”

Link is looking at her in a strange way and she is suddenly embarrassed. She rips off a piece of bread just to have something to do with her hands.

“Dad would kill me if I didn’t get a picture of Big Ben,” Link says after a moment, and she hears it in his voice. Warmth. Nostalgia, maybe, like he’s remembering something someone once said. Probably a someone they don’t talk about anymore. Instead that someone hangs around conversations, memories, looming. Like a ghost.

“You can print one out of a book, then. There’s thousands to choose from.”

Link smiles, and it’s so nice to see him smile. She wonders how often he does it at school. If he’s found people that make him smile. Or a person. Just one. She wants so desperately to ask, but she doesn’t, because she remembers. This has to be done on Link’s time.

Which, in Link’s time, will probably never happen at all. 

“Are Mom and Dad seeing you off to the airport?” she asks instead. Somehow, even that is safer.

“Dad is,” Link says, and he rolls his eyes. “Mom says he wants to have one-on-one male bonding time before I go. Whatever that means.” 

Ellen hopes it doesn’t mean what she thinks it might mean. He’s gotten the message, she thinks. Loud and clear.

“You’ll miss them,” she says, mostly to placate herself. “Not at first, but in a few months. When you’re on a train in Italy. Traveling through the countryside by yourself.”

He might not, actually. But she hopes he does. He hopes he misses her. Even a little. 

“There are no trains in Italy,” Link teases. “It’s strictly gondolas there. All the time.”

She feels the urge to stick her tongue out at him, before she remembers that she’s eighteen and wearing a nice dress and they’re at a restaurant whose name she can’t even pronounce. So she settles for scrunching her nose in his direction. “Have you learned Italian yet?”

“Si, certo,” he says, his accent impeccable.

And then—she can’t help it. “How about German?”

He opens his mouth to answer, but he cuts himself off, and his face hardens. They both know it wasn’t an entirely innocent question and she prays, indulgently, that she hasn’t just ruined everything.

A few tense seconds pass and then Link says, slightly strained, “Why do you ask? Hoping to take a stab at Dad’s book over break?”

He’s given her an out. He’s given her an out, and she’s going to take it, and they’ll move past without incident. And at the end of the night, he’ll pay for their dinners, and he’ll leave a generous tip because that’s how their parents raised them, and they’ll say goodbyes and take separate taxis—Ellen to her dorm, Link to their family’s home. Because that is what is scripted. That is what they do.

Ellen doesn’t take it. 

“Link, I think you should go to Germany,” she says, in one steady breath.

He blinks at her. He’s surprised, and indignant, and then he’s nothing at all, because he’s got wiping all emotion from his face down to a science. “Why would I go to Germany, Ellen?”

But it’s still there. She’s looking for the molehills. Understanding their private sibling language just by the way he curls his hand around the stem of his wineglass, tight-knuckled and tense. Knowing that if they don’t have this conversation now, they never will. Knowing that Link will come back from six months in Europe and be somebody else.

“You should see him,” she says, and feels extraordinarily brave. “It’s been long enough. You should see him.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Link mumbles furiously into his drink. 

“I asked. I know you’re going to be mad, but I asked, and he would—”

Link tears his eyes up immediately to stare at her and now, now she can’t read her brother at all. “You still talk to him?” he asks, trying to sound like he doesn’t care either way, and failing.

“Not often, but yes. We write letters sometimes.” Ellen picks up her wine and takes a sip. Her mouth feels dry, and it doesn’t help any. She swallows hard. 

Again she’s lost eye contact. Link is glaring at the plate of bread between them. If they were home, if they were anywhere else, this is when he would storm off.

Ellen’s suddenly glad that she doesn’t have enough money to pay for their meals. Link knows this, and so he won’t leave. 

“It doesn’t—”

“He says he’d write you too, if you’d let him.” College, and distance, and growing older—Ellen is suddenly realizing that maybe she has changed too. “I know things are different but you have to want to see him. At least one more time. And you have half a year in Europe with everything in your grasp, and you should see him, Link. You should see James.”

It’s the first time his name has been spoken in their presence in a long time. It seems to shock Link back to life. He doesn’t say anything, though, not for minutes after that, and it’s either fortunate or terribly unlucky that their food arrives then, because they can pick at it in silence, even though Ellen’s heart is beating a mile a minute, and she has that feeling in her chest like she’s just run ten miles on a chilly autumn day.

She thinks Link has to feel it too.

Finally, he clears his throat.

“You were saying,” he says, sounding both evasive and straightforward, if that’s possible, cutting his steak into equal portions. “You asked him, and he—”

Ellen knows that this is hard for him. It’s hard for both of them, but he’s trying. “He said he’d like to see you,” she says quietly, tries not to scare him off. “He says you’d love Berlin.”

Link nods and takes a bite of his potatoes. After he swallows he says, “Did Mom tell you about her new work proposal?”

Startled, Ellen shakes her head no, and Link tells her about a phone call he’d had with their mother, and Ellen knows that the conversation is done, although she doesn’t feel like she’s being dismissed. She shakes it away, and speaks in all of the right places, and the rest of the night is pleasant, airy, the way their family dinners always felt. Like it’s important being there, even if nothing of real importance is being said.

After Link pays, and leaves his generous tip, and helps Ellen into her coat, they head out in the frigid night together. Link hails a taxi and opens the door for Ellen, and she feels strangely discontent, but this time, she takes the initiative. She tugs Link into a hug and squeezes tight. 

Before she pulls away, he speaks.

“If I wanted to—what would be the best way to get in contact with him?”

Something warm blossoms in Ellen’s chest. She’s surprised to find that she doesn’t feel jealous—because as much as she’d love to see James, she got some amount of closure, and Link never did. James never did. For as long as Ellen has fiercely loved James she’s known that, that in the beginning, he was Link’s, and that maybe it’s only right that it ends with them too. For now. This part of their lives. She knows what this means for Link, whether or not he’s told anyone at Yale, whether or not he’s looked in a mirror recently and thought the words he used to be so afraid of. He’s facing something big, mountainous, and Ellen thinks that she has never loved her brother more.


End file.
